Bradley Wiggins Should Have Stayed in Race, According to UCI President

OK, this is probably my last Tour post for
a while...
back to business, software and the village
after this,
but I heard this on the radio over breakfast
and I can't see much about it online.

One of the most disappointing things for
English Tour fans about
Moreni's failed dope test [tdfblog]
is the departure of his
Cofidis
team-mate Bradley Wiggins
from the race, days before the last
(and most Wiggins-winnable)
of the individual time trials.

In an interview this morning on
BBC Radio 4's Today
Programme at about 07:45 (in case you can
Listen Again to it),
there was the
question:

"We've had whole teams withdrawing.
It's not just the two who test positive.
It's the sense that those are the tip of an iceberg, isn't it?
The whole team pulls out and you don't really
know how many others in that team are
affected by the same behaviour."

"Well, I mean, the fact that the whole team
pulled out is something which the UCI is
quite annoyed about, in actual fact,
and it was that the organisers asked the teams to
pull out.
It wasn't the fact that the teams pulled out
of their own accord.
The organisers said to them,
as a result of the positive, that they got the one person
and they said they want the whole team out of
it.
That actually goes against the rules and it
shouldn't have happened.
Erm, so, from that point of view,
you can't put anything on the other riders.
You can't say that the other riders are up
to anything just because they're not in the
race. They were asked by the organisers to
get out."

The interview continues to point out how
there's much more testing in cycling now
than ever before,
and more than in any other sport
(remember, Puerto implicated footballers and
others too),
but it's interesting how the whole-team-out
approach is criticised for removing the other
riders on a team from the race testing!

Anyway, by the UCI president's reasoning,
Bradley Wiggins should still be racing.
Well done to UCI and the tour for catching
Moreni and almost-well-done
to Moreni for admitting it, but
boo Cofidis for pulling the whole team out!

"Thanks for the message. Here are some comments on the issues you
raise:

"> - On the Radio New Internationalist show "Up in Smoke", during an
interview with Peter Brown of FSF (about 43 minutes in), I was surprised
to hear the following revelation that FSF uses Skype and the failure to
challenge the claim that Skype is free software:"

The FSF doesn't use Skype. I would appreciate if you would clarify that
on your blog post. The interviewer used Skype to telephone me on an FSF
telephone. I agree that from what I said, it would be easy to infer that
FSF uses Skype, but it doesn't. The interview lasted about an hour and
we covered a lot of ground. Also, in this exchange I didn't clarify for
the listener that when the interviewer remarked that "Skype was free",
they meant as in price, but not as in freedom.

"> - I was disappointed not to find much on the FSF web site about the
need for free VoIP software, building on GNU oSIP and other free
software, instead of Skype's proprietary software, which has contained
spyware and worms already. Will you be adding such information soon?
What is the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP
systems?"

Skype is proprietary and we don't use it. In that section of the
interview we were discussing telecoms monopoly and net neutrality, and I
lost the focus on the free software issue - my bad. As far as adding an
article about VOIP on fsf.org I think that's a great idea.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can cover that immediately, as we have
some campaigns we have other campaign activities to focus on. We would
be glad to take a contribution though, if you would like to write such
an article - we might also want to think about using such an article as
a basis for a campaign.

"> - Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality and the
privacy problems of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short
interview."

Thanks for the reply!
To my shame, I'd completely forgotten that
Skype can also call ordinary telephones and
the interview didn't remind me. I guess that
might be because my main awareness of Skype
is when it's a problem, when someone gives a
skype: address instead of a sip: one or a
real phone number.

However, I'm not
sure a called person would usually say
that they were being called over Skype,
rather than being telephoned.
FSF people are smarties, though, so can
hear the artefacts, or maybe the interviewer
had mentioned it beforehand.

Anyone else want to summarise the benefits
of free software VoIP compared to Skype
systems? I won't get time before next month.

kris commented:

"There's
openwengo,
it has more features than skype (i.e. video), is encrypted, open and free. Enjoy."

I keep meaning to try openwengo, but each
time I look at it, I fail to find the source
tarball for the latest release.
It also seems to be Qt-only,
which I also try to avoid installing
(as it'd be a fourth set of desktop widgets).

At the moment, I'm using
linphone
from the command-line.
I sometimes consider replacing it with a
stand-alone telephone adapter.
I wonder: are any running free software?

Preface to the last post: I'm aware that my surprise at FSF
using Skype does raise the old question "where
do you draw the line?" - For example, do
you refuse to use the fixed-line telephone
system if your exchanges are not running
free software?

Me, I use the telephone
system because it's effectively a monopoly
and we don't have an alternative that works
for me. I sometimes try to nibble at the
system with
the Phone Co-op
and
more VoIP use,
but it's no fun banging my head against a wall.
However, I
boycott
Skype because
I can't tell what it's doing, there have
been enough bad reports that I don't trust it
and the alternatives of SIP and IAX work for
me,
but I expected FSF not to use Skype for
idealistic reasons.

On the
Radio New Internationalist
show "Up in Smoke",
during an interview with
Peter Brown of
FSF
(about 43 minutes in),
I was surprised to hear
the following revelation that FSF uses Skype
and the failure to challenge the claim that
Skype is free software:

"Peter Brown: ... This interview today is being transmitted through
Skype.
We're talking through Skype.
Now, that obviously is a direct threat to the
entrenched telecoms and they would like
to restrict that,
to lower the quality of the voice connection
and they want to do that with lots of other
types of transmission.

Rachel Maher: And can they do that? Because Skype of course
is free and there's a really direct benefit
for organisations like ours, which is a
non-profit organisation using Skype technology. Will they be able to do that?

Peter Brown: Yes, so what they can do is easily identify
types of information being passed, so what they
can typically do is
downgrade the service that you're using,
so that - for instance, voice communication - those packets of
data can be slowed down,
effectively making voice communciation more
difficult.
Now this can only really be achieved if they're able to manipulate legislation.
Unfortunately, they have a long history of
being very successful at this.
I mentioned earlier on that
Digital Restrictions Management
are a threat to our freedoms because
it's allowing them to erect gateways and
to control what it is that we can view and
do with our computers. ..."

I was disappointed not to find much on
the FSF web site
about the need for free VoIP software,
building on
GNU oSIP
and other free software,
instead of Skype's proprietary software,
which has contained
spyware
and
worms
already.
Will you be adding such information soon?
What is
the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP systems?

Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality
and the privacy problems of
Google,
Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short
interview.

Although a small puddle formed uphill
of our house, it soon soaked away,
so I thought we'd got away without any problems
from the unexpected
Summer Rain [niq's soapbox]
around here, but it seems I was wrong...

Walking along Kewstoke Road yesterday,
I was surprised to see sandbags outside one
house. When I mentioned it in the
greengrocer's, Nicky (excuse any misspelling) said
they'd been sweeping the water flowing
down the hill away from the shop door,
as it would kill the wood floor
and the electrics beneath if they didn't.
It seems the other side of the hill also had
some flash floods, reported in
The Weston Mercury - News: The day the rains came down.

In the longer term, it looks like
things may change drastically around here if
an entrepreneur from Burnham-on-Sea succeeds
in his plan to wall in Weston-super-Mare
with
Severn Lake
succeeds.
(tip
WWN
)
What would that do to floods?

In the UK, the
BARB Weekly Summaries
show the tour's London-Canterbury Stage 1
charting with 178,000 viewers on itv4.
That's up from 143,000 for 2006's stage 1 (up 24%).
Last year's itv4 coverage seems to have peaked at 197,000, so
it'll be interesting to see how later stages
fare, as details are announced.

Stage 1 was also shown on the more widely
available (analogue+digital) itv1 channel.
The itv1 coverage didn't chart,
so it must have had less than 3.41 million viewers, but I can't see exactly how many.

British Eurosport's reported audience for Stage 1
increased from 84,000 last year to 118,000
(up 40%).
Their 2006 peak was 100,000 for
the last Thursday highlights,
so that's already broken.
They've been advertising pretty widely, with
really annoying Franglais adverts that
mispronounce the race name ("Tardy France" eh?).

Recently, online mapping seems to be going
through a period of "if it isn't
broken yet, keep adding features until it is."
I'm looking for a UK mapping web site which
must include contour data (useful for bicycles),
be usable without JavaScript and cookies (useful for mobile browsing)
and be easy to write a search form for (useful for web links and bookmarklets);
and should include aerial photos,
postcode search and other countries.

I used to use
Multimap
but it recently started requiring JavaScript
and ditched the OS maps which showed the
contours.

Streetmap
is still usable, but the visible copy of the
beta site makes it look like they're about to
make the same JavaScript-hungry mistake
(emailed).

I'm surprised Opera's proxies are so privacy-friendly, but it makes sense to me.
I expect Google will change their adsense policies yet again soon,
if this worries their clients and they don't
want a showdown with Opera.